Current computer systems provide individuals with an opportunity to produce documents of professional quality, such as with desktop publishing software and graphics software programs. The ability to manipulate the appearance of the text within these programs is vital in allowing users greater flexibility in creativity in document production. Included in these manipulations are changes in fonts, justification, size, and other aspects of the appearance, such as bolding and italicizing.
For ease of understanding the subject matter, some definitions are herein presented. What is meant by text is words of something written or printed. What is meant by characters is abstract objects having a single and unique semantic or phonetic meaning. A glyph, as opposed to a character, is the visual, graphical appearance of a character. The particular representation of a character by a glyph is done in the context of the font, the font being a collection of glyphs which typically have an element of design consistency in their appearance.
A conventional system for rending glyphs typically uses codes known as blitters to facilitate rendering glyph-images to the screen. Blitters are typically very specialized code which can take simple input and copy and display that input onto the display device. Typically, blitters are used for a highly specialized purpose, such as rendering text to a display given a particular format of the image and characterizations of the display device. In order to accommodate the blitters, the font scaler inputs to the blitters need to be in the particular image formats which are accepted by the blitters.
A problem in the conventional glyph rendering system is the lack of adaptability to new image formats and fonts. The selections of the fonts and the image formats are completely fixed within the graphics system. The selections of the image formats are defined in the graphics system and no other fonts or formats can typically be supported. Accordingly, what is needed is a system and method for dynamically adapting new fonts and image formats which can be rendered to an output device such as a screen. The system and method should be easily implemented, cost effective and easily adaptable to existing glyph rendering systems. The present invention addresses such a need.